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 secretly ignore it. Any properly observant person can find out in a week to what extent London observes the virtue of purity. It is then left to rebellious poets and novelists and other artists to make fiery onslaughts on the tyranny: to speak of virtue as “the ash of a burnt-out fire,” to chant “the roses and raptures of vice,” or to say scornfully with Blake:

Therefore I have chosen to apply to the issue the cold deductive processes with which experience as a professor of moral philosophy has made me familiar. As I said, the Christian is free to observe his supposed divine command, the Stoic may bow to a mystic and inscrutable law, the moral aesthete may enthuse over the charm of virtue; but I maintain that the sociological or utilitarian view of morals, which is now generally accepted by the vast number of people who have ceased to be Christian, cannot control sex-relations in any other sense than this. A man must avoid injustice and hardship: a woman must use her discretion. Indeed, as the clergy and the puritans now take their stand commonly on social grounds, these social considerations are effective against them.

But the question is not merely academic. These cold and severe deductions are very properly opposed to the heated phraseology and sentimentality of Conservatives, who profess to be concerned about